Jacques Lacan
Biography Born to middle class Parisian Catholic parents, he was the first of four children. Lacan's father worked for a soap and oil manufacturer. In the 1920's, Lacan studied medicine in Paris where he was clinically trained in psychiatry. He was interested in paranoia and erotomania and connected to surrealism: "paranoid criticism". In 1934, he married Marie-Louise Blondin and had one child. In 1938, became a member of the Societe Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP) and in 1953 became its president. He would see patients for lengths of time (short sessions) over the prescribed time led to a class between himself and institutions. He also founded L'Ecole Freudienne de Paris (The Freudian School of Paris). In 1975, controversies arose within the Freudian school, leading to Lacan announcing the closing of the school he had founded in 1980; Lacana died a year later in 1981. He published only one known "book" Ecrits, ''and was notably influenced by Freud, Loewenstein, Kojeve, De Saussure, and Jakobson. Lacan is referred to as "the French Freud". from ''The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious Background and Historical Context The essay "develops some aspects of the "symbolic" structure of the psyche. It is one of Lacan's most explicit structuralist attempts to bring Freud and Saussure together. The unconscious, for Lacan, is not a hidden reservoir of repressed desires but rather a form of rhetorical energy designed both to disguise and to express those desires, which exist for psychoanalysis only in their effects. "The unconscious is structured like a language," he famously claims, This means not that the unconscious is language, but that the unconscious is like ''a language - a foreign language. In other words, the unconscious is ''structured, ''not amorphous, and it ''speaks rhetorically through the dreams, mistakes, and symptoms of the subject. In the case of psychoanalytic symptoms, it is the body itself that provides the raw material that the unconscious uses to express itself and that the analyst, like a literary critic, must "read" (1109). Key Words and Terms Language: 'seen primarily as a mediating element which permits the subject to attain recognition from the other '''Literary History: '''the history of the treatment of, and references to, a particular theme, event, etc. in literature; the history of literature; history in terms of literary events and personalities '''Psychoanalysis: '''a therapeutic method, originated by Sigmund Freud, for treating mental disorders by investigating the interaction of conscious and unconscious elements in the patient's mind and bringing repressed fears and conflicts into the conscious mind, using techniques such as dream interpretation and free association '''Representation: '''the formation or possession of images, concepts, or thoughts in the mind especially as representing, or as a means acquiring knowledge of, objects or states of affairs in the world '''Rhetoric: '''the art of using language effectively so as to persuade or influence others '''Structuralism: '''a method of investigating the structure of consciousness through the introspective analysis of simple forms of sensation, thought, images, etc. and their combination '''Subjectivity: '"the subjects sense of life"; something in oneself by which a person understands the world around them '''Key Quotations "...language and its structure exist prior to the moment at which each subject at a certain point in his mental development makes his entry into it" (1117). "...linguistics is seen to occupy the key position in this domain, and the reclassification of the sciences and a regrouping of them around it signals, as is usually the case, a revolution in knowledge" (1118). "For these children, Ladies and Gentleman will be henceforth two countries towards which each of their souls will strive on divergent wings, and between which a truce will be the more impossible since they are actually the same country and neither can compromise on its own superiority without detracting from the glory of the other" (1121). "For the signifier, by its very nature, always anticipates meaning by unfolding its dimension before it" (1122). "All our experience runs counter to this linearity, which made me speak once, on one of my seminars on psychosis, of something more like 'anchoring point's as a schema for taking into account the dominance of the letter in the dramatic transformation that dialogue can effect the subject" (1123). "What this structure of the signifying chain discloses is the possibility I have...that is to say, in so far as it exists as a language, to use it in order to signify something quite other than what it says" (1124). "One of the reasons why dreams were most propitious for this demonstration is exactly, Freud tells us, that they reveal the same laws whether in the normal person or in the neurotic" (1126). "The psychoanalytic experience does nothing other than establish that the unconscious leaves none of our actions outside its field. The presence of the unconscious in the psychological order, in other words in the relation-functions of the individual, should, however, be more precisely defined: it is not coextensive in that order, for we know that if unconscious motivation is manifest in conscious psychical effects, as well as in unconscious ones, conversely it is only elementary to recall to mind that a large number of psychical effects that are quite legitimately designated as unconscious, in the sense of excluding the characteristic of consciousness, are nonetheless without any relation whatever to the unconscious in the Freudian sense" (1126). "It is not a question of knowing whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather of knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak" (1128). "...what is needed is more than these words with which, for a brief moment I disconnect my audience: I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think" (1128). "This two-sided mystery is linked to the fact that the truth can be evoked only in that dimension of alibi in which all 'realism' in creative works takes its virtue from metonymy" (1128). Discussion The Signifier and the Signified Lacan argues that the signifier and signified are separated by a bar: "the signifier over the signified, 'over' corresponding to the bar separating the two stages" (1118). He simply states that the signifiers can slide over the top of this bar, with the signified elements beneath. This means that there is never an easy correlation between the signifier and signified, and as a result, all language and communication is produced by the failure to communicate. In contrast to his predecessor De Saussure, Lacan challenges De Saussure's model of the signified and signifier with three implications: (1) a sign is a representation of a thing, (2) signs function individually, and (3) the line that separates the signifier with the signified is only an abstract concept. He makes the example of two identical doors with one labeled "ladies" and the other "gentleman". While they are the same door, their signs can no longer be represented as a picture of a single object. It is here that a person must fit their body to the sign; telling the person where to go essentially. It is also fact that from Lacan's theory, we are morphed around signs; even before we begin to speak we are being spoken to. Metonymy and Desire, Metaphor and the Subject Lacan aligns both metonymy with desire and the slide of signifiers above the bar when he states that it is "indicating that it is the connection between signifier and signifier that permits the elision in which the signifier installs the lack-of-being in the object relation...in order to invest it with the desire aimed at the very lack it supports" (1126). This produces a situation in which desire is never satisfied; partly for the reason because one's desires can never be identified in a statement along the lines of "I desire this, this, and that." Lacan also emphasizes that the way out of the chain of unsatisfied desire is thought "crossing the bar". He aligns this operation with metaphor not metonymy. When a signifier crosses the bar, either above or below, it becomes a signified. This then leaves a space above the bar, which Lacan refers to as the subject. According to Lacan's research, the subject appears rarely and not very long but on the rare occasions when the signifier crosses the bar, leaving a gap above it. Discussion Questions Criticism Lacan inverted De Saussure's original dividing of the signified and signifier by a bar of meaning, and replaced it in which the signified is under the signifier. Critics would contend that we see here a typical example of the way 'Lacan was...an intellectual magpie', illegitimately borrowing the intellectual kudos of linguistics to give a respectable veneer to his psychoanalytic theories, without submitting to the actual rigors of the discipline itself (Wikipedia). Bibliography * Lacan, Jacques. "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, 3rd ed., Norton, 2018, pp. 1111-1117. * Lacan, Jacques. "The Signification of the Phallus." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, 3rd ed., Norton, 2018, pp. 1129-1137. See Also Sigmund Freud Rudolph Loewenstein Alexandre Kojeve